Letters

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Alex has really struggled to learn his letters. We tried to work on them last summer (when Teague learned his) and Alex wanted no part of it. I thought he just wasn’t interested. But then school started and he would come home with a letter stamped on his hand and have no clue about it’s name. I let it go for a while and then realized he still didn’t know any of his letters. About this time his teacher also emailed me and then we had a regularly scheduled parent conference. It turns out Alex excels at rhymes. He has an above average vocabulary. He can look at a letter and tell you the sound it makes and four words that start with that letter. He can not tell you it’s name.

His teacher and I decided this was just going to have to be brute force memorization and unfortunately hard for Alex. I started with two letters he already knew “A” and “O.” Then I have slowly added letters one at a time. Every time he can name all the letters from previous days with his new letter he gets an M&M. The plan seems to be working and we are finally up to 15 letters! Today we are stuck on “N.” The only time learning a letter is easy for Alex is when the name of the letter is in a word – like Z is for Zebra and T is for Teague. I have yet to find an N word that actually says “N” and not “nnnn.”

Ning and I were really impressed with the app Endless Alphabet. We had purchased it for our 3 year old to learn, but our 1 year old started using it as well and quickly learned all his letters.
Not sure how you feel about tablets- I know my sister doesnt want any screen time at all for her son.